Spoilers for the season three premiere of Breaking Bad coming up after the jump:
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The Morning After: Eat Your Vegetables
You could have spent yesterday night glued to cable news or C-SPAN, watching a contentious debate over the politics of health care in America. Or you could have put on ABC and watched the first episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Which, in its own way, is also a contentious debate over the politics—or at least the culture—of …
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TV Weekend: Breaking Bad's White-Hot Slow Burn
I liked Breaking Bad from the get-go; it had one of the best drama pilots I’ve ever seen, and I put it on my list of the 10 best shows of 2008 its first season. But season one did have its problems, chief among them a common affliction of cable dramas: a sense of frenzy and hurry, as if the show felt we’d lose interest if it didn’t …
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The Morning After: A Step (Flash)Forward
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ABC’s FlashForward returned/relaunched last night, hoping to address some of the complaints that dogged the first half of the season. I thought the two-hour return episode was an improvement in a story sense, giving us some serious movement on the backstory of who and what caused the blackouts. …
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TV Weekend: Discovery's Life, Up Close and Personal
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In 2007, Discovery aired the documentary series Planet Earth, which wowed critics, drew huge ratings and showed a nation of consumers what those new big-screen TVs were really for. An expansive nature documentary full of luscious, hard-to-get HD visuals, it combined a vaguely …
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Thursday Comedies Watch: Flirting with Lizzaster
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Fess Parker, 1924-2010
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Fess Parker, star of numerous Disney movies (Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier)—and TV’s Daniel Boone—has died at age 85. I’m a generation too young to have many firsthand memories of him (for some reason, I was never a fan of the old Disney movies as a kid), so most of my …
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Amanpour to ABC's This Week; A Good Change, or a Waste of Talent?
Going outside its current stable of reporters and anchors, ABC is hiring longtime CNN international reporter Christiane Amanpour to host the Sunday-morning This Week interview show vacated by George Stephanopoulos. TV Newser has the details; among them, that she’ll start in August, until which White House correspondent Jake Tapper (who’s …
Top 10 Music-Festival Moments
Can’t make it to Texas to see one of the 1,700 bands performing at the 2010 SXSW festival? You can console yourself with this list of the 10 most famous — and infamous — moments in music-festival history.
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The Morning After: Hit or Miss?
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I realize that I have not really written about Human Target in this space yet. I don’t have a good excuse, but I have a reason: boredom. That is, the show hovers for me in some limbo between good and bad, neither good enough that I want to note it nor interestingly bad in any way that bears …
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Lost Discussion Group: Latin Lover
Yesterday, I got the ABC logline and press release for next week’s Richard Alpert-centric episode of Lost. (SPOILER ALERT: Richard “faces a difficult choice.” I really hope that didn’t blow the whole series for you.)
What interested me most was the title, “Ab Aeterno.” Which made me think: Oh, yeah—Latin. What was up with the …
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That '70s Singer: Alex Chilton, 1950-2010
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Alex Chilton, a great American songwriter, died Wednesday of an apparent heart attack in New Orleans, at age 59. First with The Box Tops but most importantly with the Memphis band Big Star, Chilton all but invented American power-pop, even if most people will know him more by the …
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Idol Watch: A Singer Goes, A Gimmick Stays
Spoilers for last night’s American Idol final-twelve elimination last night: